The Year in Review Part 1

Top 5 things I have enjoyed about this year:

(In no particular order...)

1. Surviving my first year of teaching.
2. Becoming part of a wonderful workplace.
3. Discovering life in the Northern suburbs - quiet, a bit bogan, but a surprisingly good fit for me. Still trying to work out why!
4. Finding a great church to be a part of.
5. Living to see a Labor government FINALLY win in Australia.

Watch this space for more highlights, or perhaps lowlights (not a word, I realise) of 2007...

Home?

One of the key features of this blog in its very early days was the search for a church in my local area. It's been a while since I've written on that issue (a while, in fact, since I've written on anything). I suspect I last wrote on it when I realised that I'd found "my church". But I thought today was as good a time as any to give a bit of an update.

There was a beautiful moment in my new home church today when, instead of a sermon, we sat in groups and discussed the passage we had all just read. In what Paolo Freire would call "problem-posing education", we all asked questions about the passage, then each group had to choose one question that interested them and come up with a collaborative answer.

Now, I'm not suggesting that this is an ideal way of doing things all the time - certainly not a permanent replacement to clear Bible teaching. Some of you might already be thinking, "What if someone came up with an answer that was HERETICAL?!" (And some of you are probably thinking, "Why does he always have to talk about RELIGION?!" To you, I can only say sorry, although I'm not really.) There is always a risk of (gasp) heresy in all styles of Biblical teaching, and that risk is something that needs to be taken seriously, but today I felt very confident that all the ideas shared were "on the right track". Everything was Biblical. Everything was orthodox. There was quality learning taking place.

But what I was most impressed by today was the sense of community. Everyone came together for this discussion, and I mean everyone: children, teenagers, young adults, middle-aged adults, elderly adults. Everyone. And everyone's opinion had the chance to be heard. And then, at the end, when we prayed, everyone had the chance to pray - and, again, I mean everyone, including the little boy whose mother held him up to the microphone so that his prayer for his sick grandmother could be heard.

When I was desperately searching for the "perfect" church for me, and hoping that such a church could be found within a 5 km radius of my house, I began to wonder what was important to me. And I wondered why it was so important that I find a church that was "near" where I lived. Today I felt like I knew. Because churches are supposed to be families, and it's possible to find a family far from where you live, but it's a lot nicer to have one nearby. And, more than that, there's something about church in the inner-northern suburbs that you're not likely to get in many other places. Church in Coburg or Preston should be about as close to a full cross-section of society as you're likely to get. And today it looked like one. Not complete - some groups weren't represented - but a lot were, and that's another one of the things that I love about my church.

No perfectly-run programs, state-of-the-art buildings, slick professionalism and awe-inspiring technology can beat a diverse community coming together - truly coming together - in God's name. My church isn't perfect, but I think it's got that much going for it.

The new cool place to be

It's official. Just read this week's "Melbourne Magazine" in The Age and you'll find announced that Melbourne's Northern suburbs are now "classy". Of course, they do seem to be referring primarily to the inner sector - Brunswick, East Brunswick and Northcote. Anything west of Sydney Rd seems that bit Too Far West, and anything north of Bell St is, well, Preston.

According to the article, Melbourne's "creative classes" have been forced to take refuge in the North, because of the ridiculous housing prices that have now made their previous havens, Fitzroy and St Kilda, a somewhat yuppified pipe-dream. So, if you want to have your latte and drink it too, and maybe even create a piece of movement theatre based around the experience, you move North. Only, not too far North, because then you'll be in Greensborough. Unless you want to go all the way, and live at Monsalvat, but, let's face it, that's not an option for most of us.

Now, I'm very happy to have my hood declared the New Cool Place to Be (although a little upset that West Preston doesn't rate a mention - not surprised, note, just upset). Nevertheless, the article has made me think about my own reasons for moving North.

In reality, I moved to the North because I couldn't find anyone who wanted to move to the West (only Yarraville's cool so far, and there's no way I could afford that...). And why did I want to move to the West? To be closer to school. And, let's face it, if I'd moved to Pascoe Vale, it would hardly have been Cool. Convenient, yes. On the right train line, yes. But Cool? Sorry. Move to Westgarth for that.

What I found, when I accidentally wound up in the North, was quite an unexpected home. But I don't love it for the artiness or trendiness, although, to paraphrase Sir Humphrey, "it's nice to know it's there". No, what I fell in love with was the diversity, the humility, the simplicity, the quiet, and, in a strange way, the grunginess of it all. Only here in West Preston, everything's grungy because it's falling apart, not because a trendy designer made it look like that.

I maintain, of course, that it's only a matter of time before West Preston becomes Cool, but we've got to wait for Thornbury to catch up with Northcote first, and that may take a while. Meanwhile, I think I'm happy to enjoy living in a place that isn't too trendy for it's own good, and is beginning to feel like some kind of home.

Anything I thought I knew

I've always loved the Book of Job, even though it's a deeply unsatisfying (maybe even dissatisfying) book. It deals with perhaps the hardest of life's questions - why good people suffer - only to give no answer whatsoever. People tend to find that annoying. It's a long book, and they endure every beautiful but tortured word of it to find that the answer, when God does finally answer, is more or less, "So you think you know better than me?" It's a rhetorical question in the truest form. The answer is obvious; so obvious that it will never be required. All Job can really say at the end of it all is, "Sorry...", only to have wealth and prosperity restored to him. The meaning of all this? Who knows.

The way most people talk about Job, you wonder if they think the Bible-compilers overlooked the fact that, oops, there's no clear answer at the end. "Bugger," they're probably thinking (or "Ugger-bay", because, given the time period, they no doubt spoke (Pig) Latin), "we didn't notice that. Oops. Should've put in that other book about suffering that gives a clear-cut, completely satisfying answer." Yeah, someone really stuffed up there, eh?

My favourite album of the moment (note, Esther, that I've said "of the moment") is mewithoutYou's 2006 effort, "Brother Sister", and it's an absolute masterpiece, but a lot of it makes little sense (interpretations of "Orange/Yellow/Brownish Spider", anyone?). Part of that, I suspect, comes from an admirable willingness to accept, even embrace, uncertainty. In "Wolf Am I!", for example, there's a wonderful, Plato-esque, notion of the world as we know it being fairly pale and insignificant in the light of eternity. We're shadows, the song suggests, and so is the world around us - so who can really comprehend what we can barely see, what may not even be all that real?:

So SHADOW AM I!
The material world seems to me like a newspaper headline -
it explicitly demands your attention
and it may even contain some truth,
but what's really going on here?

"Who knows?" seems to be an apt answer, although mewithoutYou are happy enough to not even say that much.

In another terrific song, "The Sun and the Moon", Job's name is evoked in the line, "There was hope for Job like a cut down tree/I hope that there's such hope for me". Where did Job's hope lie? In God, apparently, in the roots of the tree which remain after it's been cut down. No-one looks at a cut down tree and sees it as being especially hopeful, but this band aren't particularly interested in how things appear. After all, the following line declares that "Dust be on my mind's conceptions/and anything I thought I knew". Thought I knew - there's the key phrase, I think. What do we really know? Here we are asking the "big" questions, angry when there's no clear cut answer. But what hope do we really have to understand the answers when we get them?

mewithoutYou's label friends, As Cities Burn, say it all in their song, "Clouds", with the line, "I think our god isn't God/if he fits inside our heads". It's a fair point, really. No wonder Job could only say, "Sorry." There will always be an answer to every question, but that answer will rarely be simple. I don't agree with many things that H.L. Mencken said, but there is one famous quote of his that I think is apt to finish with: "There is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong."

Love, love is a verb

If you had asked me a few years ago what was the greatest album ever recorded, I would have said, without a moment's hesitation, "Mezzanine" by Massive Attack. And if you had then asked what was the greatest song, I would have said "Teardrop" off the same album.

While the album remains in my collection, I must admit I've gone a while without listening to it, but the gorgeous Jose Gonzales reminded me recently of my love for "Teardrop" (his version is pretty much as good as the original) and today, despite being November, is a very wet and wintry day in Melbourne, exactly the sort of day for whipping out "Mezzanine" again.

It isn't a happy album, I must admit. I was always aware of that fact, but I guess being much happier now than I was in my early years of University the general gloom of it all is that little bit more noticeable. That said, it remains incredibly brilliant, and quite cutting edge, despite being ten years old (gasp), and "Teardrop" remains one of the most beautiful songs ever written.

The lyrics, of course, are bollocks, because the wonderfully loopy Elizabeth Fraser wrote them (and she is responsible for some of the most endearing goobledegook ever penned, including that Cocteau's song with the lyrics "Fafa lala faskata"). However, the song does begin with that amazing opening line, "Love, love is a verb/Love is a doing word". dc Talk, of course, made the same observation several years earlier, but their song was crap, whereas Liz's is a masterpiece. The rest of the lyrics, most of which I've never understood, are poetic but seem a bit nonsensical - "Tear drop on the fire of a confession/Feathers on my breath/Most faithful my love" (which I'd always heard as "Most fearful mirror"), and so on. It's not really clear how it all relates to love being a verb/doing word, but the words serve as an amazing accompaniment to some of the most breathtakingly beautiful vocals to ever be recorded.

Is this really a love song? It's not so clear. If it is, it's not a happy one; hence the crying into the "fire of confession". But I suppose love doesn't always make us happy, does it? Sometimes love requires the kind of honesty that will hurt all involved. But love is, after all, an action, not mere sentiment. It's good to be reminded of that every now and then.

And good also to remember what a wonderful song "Teardrop" was, and still is. The rest of the album is pretty damn good too.

Blah

Well, it's been a while now since I last wrote on this blog, and that's mostly because, outside of the classroom, my brain is scarcely functioning. A bit of an exaggeration, I realise, but I certainly haven't had sufficient brain-function to write anything particularly interesting or incisive (assuming, of course, that what I write here usually is interesting and incisive!). If I'm not marking, or preparing lessons for the next day, I'm eating, or sleeping. That, or engaged in something incredibly mindless, like playing Spider Solitaire on my computer, or trying to achieve the next level of SuperPoke.

A friend of mine who is doing her Honours year at Uni this year responded to my claims of being "braindead" by saying that she was feeling the same way, and said how sad it was that currently both the educators and the educated were braindead. She has a good point. It's that time of year, I suppose, when all involved in education wish they were somewhere else, doing something that doesn't require thinking.

Now the Melbourne Cup long weekend looms, and, much as I disapprove of the races in general, I'm incredibly thankful that they give me four days off. Hopefully we can all recharge a little bit, and go in next week with enough fuel to take us through to the end of term.

And maybe I'll regain the brain capacity to write something more interesting on my blog. Assuming I ever had the capacity in the first place.

Contact

I must admit, I have been wondering a bit lately why so much Christian indie of the moment is some kind of variant of emo. Think about it: how many Christian indie bands can you think of right now who aren't playing emo or emo-core? And no, Switchfoot don't count as indie. Exactly. Almost everyone's emo in some form or another.

But listening to the latest album by cult hardcore band As Cities Burn, "Come Now Sleep", has helped me understand why, aside from being very "now", emo should be such a pervasive genre in Christian circles. As the name, an abbreviation of "emotional", makes quite obvious, emo is a very emotional style of music, and, when coming in its more hardcore form, is able to express almost every emotion known to man, usually in the one song.

That's when it's done well, of course. Done badly, emo just sounds whiny and turgid. But As Cities Burn do it very well. They're very much at the hardcore end of the spectrum, but qualify as emo here primarily because of the presence of lyrics like "She's putting cuts on her legs to bleed out the devil". The album also ends with the soaring, heartbreaking 13 minute epic "Timothy", about the recent death of friend of the band members. Yes, this is certainly an emotional album. But it's the breadth of the emotional spectrum that interests me here, and the way that a style of music like (emotional) hardcore can deal with so many emotions that are a fundamental part of the Christian walk, yet are so often neglected in our music.

When he was more folky and less hardcore, David "Pedro the Lion" Bazan wrote a brilliant song called "Secret of the Easy Yoke", that talks about the experience of near-crippling doubt. "If this is a test", he sings, "I hope that I'm passing." I know the feeling. Few Christians would feel free to sing a song about feeling detached from God, feeling like you don't even really love Him. And yet we all feel like that sometimes. So why shouldn't we sing about it?

"Come Now Sleep" has everything in it. Fury, anguish, despair, grief, complacency, righteous indignation. And, most brilliantly I believe, it has doubt and detachment. The first track, "Contact", is the best example of this. Changeable, soaring between majesty, devastation and indifference, the song is just about as accurate a representation as you can get of how it feels to be shut off from God while trying desperately to reconnect. It's an incredible song, and the lyrics play no small part in its brilliance. The album never settles for despair. It ends with hope, in fact. But there's a time for everything, including despair, a feeling that is present everywhere in the Psalms yet absent in most Christian music. It's not absent in this song. "God, does grace reach to this side of madness?" vocalist Cody Bonnette asks. The answer is, of course, but the song doesn't include the answer because you never feel like there's an answer at the time. The conclusion the song comes to is an incorrect one, but very truthful all the same. "God must be asleep," Bonnette sings at the end. "God must be asleep."

We all know that feeling, that point when we can't comprehend how God could possibly be awake and yet leave us in our pain. The Psalmist Asaph took the sentiment a step further in Psalm 77 and asked, "Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time? Has God forgotten to be merciful?" (77:8-9a). Of course he hadn't forgotten to be merciful, just as we know, listening to "Contact" that, of course God isn't asleep. God never sleeps, as another Psalm tells us. But the best art shows us life as we know it to be. If the Bible doesn't shirk away from feelings of doubt and despair, why should Christian art?

If it takes a good dose of emoification to make our music that bit more honest, I say, bring it on.

Independent Music Part 2: I Depend on Me

When I was in high school, it was "alternative". Practically everyone listened to alternative music, and the bands that they referred to under that umbrella term would make Thurston Moore turn in his grave, were he dead. There was nothing alternative about Blink 182. How can you be alternative when you sound like everything else? Alternative to what? Beethoven?

So the truly alternative amongst us listened to Beethoven (sometimes; actually not that often, but we liked to say we did), jazz, emo (before it was cool) post and proto punk and Pink Floyd, and bemoaned how banal "alternative" music had become. Then we discovered, in our first few years of Uni (country kids were always a few steps behind everyone else), that Indie was the new alternative. If you wanted to shun mainstream music, you simply looked to the bands that were not signed to majors - which, I guess, excluded Sonic Youth in their days of being signed to Geffen, but musically they never sold out, so we could forgive them.

Now, it seems, Indie really is the new alternative - in the sense that everyone is listening to Indie, and it's hard to know what to believe in any more.

Or is it? Now, maybe I'm just getting soft in my not-so-old age, but I have to admit I like that "Hide and Seek" song by Imogen Heap, and it doesn't fuss me too much that some of my Year 9 students like it too. I'm also not deeply concerned that it was played on "Australian Idol". At least Dicko had never heard of it. And just recently I've started to listen to Deas Vail, the latest Christian Indie thing, and like them, even though there's nothing remotely ground-breaking about their pure and innocuous blend of "Jimmy Eats Death Cabs of Cutie at the Coldplay Symposium". They write great songs, they perform them well, and the sound is familiar and friendly. And, you know, when I want to hear the direction of truly interesting indie, there's always mewithoutyou's latest release, where conventional song-structure and musicianship are considered things of beauty but bores forever.

There's a place for both the cutting edge and the straightforward. We only need to fear what's happening to "indie" if we start to find that there's no place for the cutting edge anymore. If we start to lose any sense of what being "independent" means, and there ceases to be any artistic freedom in the recording industry, then we should worry. But for some artists, being brilliant upholders of the indie genre is all they should be expected to do. They're not selling out. They're just doing what they know best, and doing it well - and I'm not going to stop them from doing that.

Starless and Bible Belt

So yesterday I went on one of my occasional pilgrimages out to Melbourne's Bible Belt to see my wonderful friend Sharon. The occasion yesterday was a fundraiser for the Youth Dimension Coffee Shop she is leading in Millicent, SA. And it was quite a fun afternoon, really. The weather was beautiful, and the main entertainment of the afternoon was the band, San Salvador, playing in what is known as the Factory at Mitcham Baptist Church, a kind of industrial storage space with basketball court and lots of packaging lying around the place. We all sat on couches while San Salvador played, and I was pleased by the generally relaxed, cool vibe of the afternoon. The band were also pretty good. If you've ever thought, as I often do, that there just aren't enough art punk/ska-core songs inspired by "Moby-Dick", well, check out San Salvador's MySpace and you will be pleased to find that there's at least one more now.

There were also a few talks along the lines of "why you should come to Coffee Shop", and I surprised myself by, for the first time in four years, considering potentially going. I was partly excited to hear of the existence of a new shop in Jindabyne, which sounds like a pretty cool place (and I liked the film). And I've also started to remember everything that I liked about the two shops that I did in my first couple of years living in Melbourne. And yet part of me feels quite uncertain about the prospect of going along and being the only Anglican from the Northern Suburbs - in short, feeling even more the odd one out than I felt last time I went.

That being said, I've grown up a lot since my last shop, and am much more secure in myself. Nevertheless, my most recent experience of going to a church in the 'Burbs was surprisingly discouraging - mostly because I was reminded, yet again, of how little I could ever fit into a church where paintball and sport were the two things that brought men together. My memories of shop are of a similar kind of culture, one that I'm a bit scared of, to be honest. Because no-one likes feeling left out, but you get sick of trying your hardest to fit the mould when you suspect most other people there were just born loving paintball and saying "Awesome" lots.

Each shop, I've grown to love everyone on the team, and come to respect them for who they are. And I suspect they've come to feel the same way about me. And yet, five years after I first went on a shop, I now have a grand total of one close friend from either of my two shop teams. The impact that each shop had on me spiritually has gone nowhere. But the community? It still seems to be alive and well. I'm just not in it.

I'll pray about whether to go on shop this year. Maybe it'll be a chance to overcome some of the baggage of the past. Or maybe it'll just remind me that, while the gospel isn't bound by culture, a few too many of its followers are. I really hope it could be the former, not the latter.

Affordable Housing

So apparently the time has passed. I understood that buying property in West Preston would be cheap now and an excellent investment for the future, but a colleague told me at work yesterday that she thought it was already getting expensive. So where does that leave me, if I ever do feel like buying something? Oakhill in Reservoir is apparently affordable, and in these things it doesn't pay to be a snob. In fact, snobbery costs quite a bit of money.

I love the Northern suburbs. I feel like there's a truer cross-section of society here, and community that isn't dependent on having a tennis court and swimming pool for entertaining. And yet it hardly seems worth the price that you would pay currently to live here. My rent is very cheap, I know, but that has less to do with the suburb I live in and more to do with my landlords being the parents of my two housemates. Much as I like Preston, I can't help feeling that, if prices are too high already, the market is clearly growing more rapidly than the suburb. There are very few services in West Preston, aside from the Regent Village shops (not half as quaint or charming as the name implies; there's a Post Office/Newsagent that's mostly used to buy Tattslotto tickets, a Pharmacist, and a few takeaway places) and the Foodworks that just opened down the road. If this suburb is too expensive for me, where would I have to live to get something affordable?

It's all academic, really. Nothing is affordable for me right now, and I'm very happy renting. It's just a bit of a shock to realise that even my humble and moderately dirty suburb is becoming "gentrified" in terms of prices. It's mostly a shock because there's little evidence of this gentrification when you walk down the street. What I see is a humble, quiet, multicultural streetscape, with a reasonable amount of rubbish lying around - and I guess people are willing to pay good money for that, if it means living twenty minutes from the city.

Beyond our galaxy

Alright, because my last post was in part a plug for some awesome music, let me now give a short plug for some truly incredible music.

For the last few years, I've been quite an avid fan of anything that Steve Hindalong or Marc Byrd associate themselves with. It began with Cool Hand Luke, that once hardcore, then shoegazer/art/indie, then hardcore again, band that first revealed to me that, yes, praise the Lord, there is Christian indie music out there. Then I realised that Steve had also been a key member and songwriter in The Choir, who I'd loved when younger, and who, when listening to their 1996 album "Free Flying Soul" in my 20s, now reminded me a bit of a dreamier Sebadoh. Their album from last year, "O How the Mighty Have Fallen", confirmed that they really are awesome, and some of it can be heard on their MySpace (along with the classic, "About Love"). Then there's Hammock, the new collaboration between Marc Byrd and his Common Children collaborator Andrew Thompson. They play magically beautiful music that is somewhere between Sigur Ros and Aphex Twin, and they can be heard on their MySpace.

My latest discovery is Christine Glass, Marc's wife, who provided angelic vocals on both Cool Hand Luke albums, and has sung with Hammock and in a collaboration with Marc, appropriately called Glassbyrd. While trawling the web for Christian music that we could get very excited about, fellow-Christian indie obsessive Lachie and I encountered Christine's MySpace which featured, much to my excitement, a Hammock cover of the Catherine Wheel classic, "Black Metallic" with Christine providing vocals. Now, there are two things I'd like to say about that song. Firstly, it has very similar chords to "God of Wonders" - Marc, were you thinking of that song when you wrote yours? Perhaps? Secondly, however, it's amazing. I mean, really amazing. The original has been a favourite of mine for a while, and I was astonished by how Hammock were actually able to add something to a song that they owe such a clear debt to.

When I get so excited about really good Christian music, I sometimes wonder why. Music doesn't need to be Christian for me to like it, of course, and yet I know that I identify with Christian music in a way that I don't with almost anything else. And yet I'm quite profoundly limited by how damn boring most Christian music is that when I discover something I really like, I like it so much more for the sheer fact that it exists. Finding the Hammock version of "Black Metallic" was particularly special for me because it helped give that much-needed confirmation for me that, yes, there are other Christians who like the same music as me.

A Christian man I have the utmost respect for in most cases once talked about a youth group leader he knew who was really into "alternative" music only to be convicted that he was being a bad example for his youth group kids. I don't know what "alternative" music he was listening to, but, aside from being creative and interesting, there's really very little, if anything, in much indie music that other Christians have reason to be offended by. Besides, in one of those lovely double-standards that I'd let get to me if I wasn't trying to be godly and loving, many Christians are willing to listen to JT singing about sex on, quite literally, every song of his new(ish) album. There's nothing more Christian about mainstream music. It's just that more Christians listen to it. But I go to Hammock's website (www.hammockmusic.com) and see their amazing commitment to art and beauty there, and I can't help but feel that this, so much more than all the crap that gets played on Nova and Mix FM, brings glory to God, because it declares the glory of all that He has created - quite fitting, I guess, from the man who wrote these words:

God of wonders, beyond our galaxy
You are holy, holy
The universe declares your majesty
You are holy, holy.

It shouldn't just be the words that declare God's glory. It should be the music too. Marc, Steve and Christine have that down-pat in their music, and it's for that that I love them.

(And on that note, how awesome are mewithoutyou?)

Merri Vista Social Club

Last night, thanks to these wonderful things called school holidays, I had the rare pleasure of going to a mid-week gig at the Northcote Social Club, the place where trendsters, bogans and everyday guys and gals get together and have a party. Or at least they did last night. And it was beautiful.

The occasion was the first night of Old Man River's Aussie tour. You'll probably know his single. It's the "la la" one. You'd recognise it if you heard it. Anyway - I went along with a group, one friend being a big OMR fan and quite eager to see him. I'd heard the "la la" song (it's actually called "La!") and thought it was pretty good, so I was happy enough to pay $15 to hang out in Northcote, which everyone knows is the new cool place in Melbourne, until that title is finally, rightfully bestowed upon West Preston.

I didn't anticipate what an amazingly awesome night I would get for those mere $15. Let me tell you about just a few things about the night that were particularly awesome.

1. The support act: The Hampdens. I thought I'd heard of them, but I might have just been thinking of the mountain range. I doubt many people had heard of them, but few could go away from the night not recognising what incredible performers they are, even at this early stage in their careers. There were moments when I felt as if seeing them now is a little like it would have been to see the Cocteau Twins in Scotland back in the early 80s. The lead vocalist has the same eerie beauty of a young Elizabeth Frazer, or maybe Beth Gibbons, and the charming, gangly awkwardness of Beth Orton in her early days. You know she could sing beautifully if she wanted to, and at times she does, but most of the time she'd rather be creative and unique, which she does very well. It's impossible to pin-point what her voice sounds like, but you know that it's the last sound you would have expected to hear coming from her mouth when you first saw her. It's a voice that fills your head with comparisons, but none of them quite cut it. It has the same originality that people probably associated with Siouxsie Sioux when she arrived on the scene, or maybe the way I felt about Björk when I first heard her. It soars between deep and frightening, and high and graceful; and all through these changes it's utterly original and compelling.

And, then there was that moment when Jules, the keyboardist, stepped out the front and sang harmonies with the bassist, and you felt that somehow, more than anything you'd heard in a while, this was Music. It was filled with love, originality and amazing skill. I'd tell you to check out thehampdens.com, watch the "Generation Y" video and download the free remix - and indeed I do tell you to do that - but I am also aware that, if you weren't there last night, you probably won't get it fully. Sorry to say it. And if it annoys you that I'm excluding you, let that annoyance compel you to go see them next time they come to your home town - or buy the album when it comes out early next year

2. The second awesome thing about last night? Well, Old Man River, of course, who proved to be so much more than his Jewfro or la-las combined. Indeed, "La!" was the absolute last song they played, after the encore, and, when it came, it was magical. It followed a minimalist version of Rhianna's "Umbrella", performed by the frontman and his stunning keyboardist/backing vocalist, and involved much singing along from the audience, who didn't find the chorus all that hard to remember. But the most awesome part? Hard to say. It might have been the fact that OMR himself (sadly I don't know his name) was happy to banter with the audience, played the beginning of "Stairway to Heaven" when it was asked of him, shared Paw Paw ointment with one very excited girl in the audience and was just generally a damn good sport. Or was it the fact that he got the Hampdens up on stage to sing "La!" with him at the end? Or was it the point where he got a girl who was celebrating her birthday up on the stage, along with her boyfriend, to sing "La!" with him and the Hampdens? Yes, it could very well have been any of those points. Or it might have been - yes, it probably was - the point at the end of "La!" when he asked us all, on the count of four, to start making crazy animal noises along with him. It was a beautiful moment of Northcote nuttiness that none of us will forget. It united us all in the experience of hearing real, and, in the truest sense, live music. At the end of the gig, strangers chatted to each other, and to the band members, and it really did feel, not like an ultra-cool live music venue, but like a social club.

And that was just the first night of their tour.

It's time to face the book

Some thoughts on Facebook...

In years to come, will my generation have Facebook reunions, when we'll get together with all the other Facebook Alumni and remember about the good old days when we "poked" each other and sent each other goldfish?

If we do ever have reunions, where will they be? Online, or in some actual physical space somewhere?

When we're elderly and retired, will we have online communities instead of Probus, Rotary and Lions?

When people put full-length avatars of themselves in bikinis, do they ever think that complete strangers might be seeing them? Do they want complete strangers seeing them?

Are they really photos of them in bikinis?

Maybe I should have a picture of someone in a bikini as my avatar and see if anyone notices.

When I request Plato Son of Ariston as my friend, who is administrating his account?

Is Plato Son of Ariston also administering an account for Socrates, when he carries out both sides of an online dialogue?

Are the conversations on Plato's wall ideals, or just shadows?

Just some important issues that Facebook brings up. We need to be engaging thoughtfully with the culture, after all.

Northside Reading

It's true, I'm going mildly nuts with this whole blogging thing. Having two blogs of my own and a student blog that I administrate just isn't enough for me. Until I've got as many blogs as Mike Patton has "side projects", I won't be satisfied.

This latest venture isn't a blog as such - it's just that I couldn't figure out quite how to set it up unless I gave it a domain of it's own. This is an extension of the "Northside Reading" segment of Ideas From the North, where I'll (hopefully) take the time to comment in a bit more detail on the variety of books I'm reading at any given time.

There aren't any posts about specific books just yet, but I'll get there. Click on the name in this post or follow the link in my blogroll to check it out.

2 sir W lov

Well, my fascination with the blogosphere has now taken me into brave new territory - the world of educational blogging.

Not that that's so new for me. I do, after all, have my own personal, rarely updated educational blog. But now I'm experimenting in a blog that my students, and other students at the same year level, can use. The theory behind it as that the web has a magical power over our students, that some who are completely unwilling to talk in class will happily talk online for hours. Is this something we can harness for educational effect? Quite probably. Is it easy to do? Yes and no.

Setting up the blog itself was a breeze. It took a mere five minutes on learnerblogs.org to set myself up with a username, password and blog. Getting the site functioning as something more than a personal vanity project was a bit trickier. Initially I planned on making it something that all students had to register for, to avoid any unwanted e-traffic. (Which is, I regret to say, why I'm not going to put a link to it from here, because, while I theoretically trust you all, I don't know who most of you are, and am not sure that I want you hanging around my students.) However, given how few people actually have the site's URL, I doubt it will get out of hand. If it does...well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Ultimately, it was too much of a hassle to register other teachers, let alone students, so in the end I gave up. This shouldn't be a problem, unless we start getting e-stalked by someone particularly unsavoury, but the main shortcoming is that students can't write posts. They can only respond to the posts that we've written.

Neverthless, as far as student-centred learning goes, the site's doing pretty well now. Students are chatting enthusiastically about Arthur Miller's "The Crucible", using punctuation and grammar that would make Miller cringe, but they would have done that in their essays anyway.

The one dampener has been the handful of students that have just HAD to be immature about it - the kind, of course, who would have been immature about most things we did, but it's still a nuisance, particularly when their immaturity is now theoretically open for the world to see. It's also just a bit sad when some of the students who this was most designed for - kids who are into computers but not brilliant at English - treat it as a joke or a waste of time. And, of course, there's the kids who haven't even got a copy of "The Crucible" yet, and no amount of technology is going to help them write intelligent comments on a book they haven't read. It's a sad reminder that, no matter how much effort we put into being engaging, there's still a need for students to try being engaged.

But on the whole, it's been a roaring success, at least for its first two days of active existence. Certainly the number of intelligent and useful comments being made far outweigh the idiocy of some other comments, and, at the end of the day, I'm the site administrator, and can block any comment that I deem inappropriate. On the plus side, students from different classes are communicating readily with each other, and with a range of different teachers - a real community of learning.

Pity some kids still have to be idiots, but you can't succeed with everyone. Technology's not the all-purposes answer, but it's certainly helping.

Revival in Moreland?

Well, it's been a while since I've blogged on my search for a church community. That doesn't mean that the search has been on hold - quite the opposite. I guess I've just been a bit reluctant to blog about my thoughts partly because I haven't wanted to sound critical of some churches that may be functioning perfectly well but just aren't quite what I'm looking for. Then there have been other churches that I do feel quite critical about but don't feel that this is the forum for expressing that...

Nevertheless, here I am once again talking about it, and, PTL, I have good news to relate. I've now found a church - I think...While I'm very excited about it all, and confident that it's where I'm supposed to be, it's all quite new and I don't exactly want to speak too soon. That said, I went there today for the third time in a row, and am still happy there. A good sign, I suspect. It's a small evangelical Anglican church in Moreland - not Darebin, but it's only five minutes' drive from my place, and my end of Darebin is practically Moreland anyway (see the attached photograph that I took while going for a stroll near my place - the sign says "Moreland City Council: Diverse Community", if you can't make it out).

Now, when I started the whole church-hunting process, I wasn't exactly sure what I was looking for. One of my housemates suggested, some months ago, that I might want to write out a list of essentials, which I thought was a wonderful idea, but didn't have a clear enough concept in my head of what was and wasn't essential. I suppose what brought me to this position was a fairly naive, faith-driven notion that the church in the inner north was struggling a bit and that, now that I was living in the area, it would be good for me to get involved there, rather than commuting to the east each Sunday. I suppose I also had an idea about localised community, something lacking a lot in Melbourne, and wanted to be part of a geographical church community for the first time since I left home.

Having now found the kind of church I want to be a part of, I've also been able to figure out what my criteria were. And they aren't surprising, but I suspect I needed to go through the last eight to seven months to figure them out anyway. I won't list them here, because they're probably not that interesting to anyone not me, but what's really struck me, and surprised me, has been a growing need for clear orthodoxy.

I say this is surprising because, while I've grown up in the evangelical church, and have been a low-church evangelical Anglican for the past four or so years, I always felt a bit liberal around most evangelicals, but then quite fundamentalist around liberals. I'm still not crazy about categories, but I have to say that, from my travels to different churches in the area, I'm not blown away by how successful the more "fresh expressions of faith" are proving to be. Not because there's anything wrong with being fresh - quite the contrary - but because they are seemingly too caught up in being fresh that they aren't spending enough time going to the "ancient paths" to be reminded of what the foundation of our faith is. Now I'm not talking about liturgy or church tradition here so much as an understanding of the common basis of faith that can unite today's believers with the church as it was at all different stages throughout history. Because, as a member of the Acts 29 Network suggested in one talk, you can engage with culture all you like, but you also need a foundation in faith and doctrine, otherwise you're just "engaging with culture", but what are you engaging them with?

There are a lot of questions abounding about what constitutes orthodoxy. Currently I'm living in an area where the "Orthodox" church is quite prominent, and that's a whole different matter. For evangelicals, orthodoxy often centres around certain recurring debates. Some would say you are not orthodox if you believe in the ordination of women, or if you support gay marriage, or don't believe in predestination, or agree with all the parts of Calvin's TULIP. Now I've deliberately used a mixture of issues where I do hold the mainstream line, issues where I diverge, and issues where I don't know what I think. I'm not sure how essential these issues are to our faith, mostly because I believe that, if we get the fundamentals right, a lot of other things will follow. If we have a healthy, growing relationship with Christ, all manner of sin and heresy will be brought to our attention by the convicting power of the Holy Spirit. And if the Holy Spirit isn't convicting us all that often? Well, male or female, gay or heterosexual, whatever our individual struggles are, if we're never being convicted of sin in our lives, we either don't have the Holy Spirit, or aren't listening.

Here's my suggestion for what should constitute orthodoxy:
That we believe Jesus Christ was God in human flesh, and that He was without sin, but died a sinner's death so that we could be reconciled to God, if we put our trust in Him.

It's possibly not quite that simple. It often isn't. But I've been to some churches lately where that basic belief has not been mentioned once. Should it be mentioned every service? It probably wouldn't do any harm, and it would certainly help keep things on track. The Anglican liturgy offers a mixture of creeds and prayers that cover the essentials every week, whatever the sermon topic. That's probably why, at this stage of my life, I'm most happy to call myself an Anglican. First and foremost, I'm a Christian, but right now, as I search for different ways to minister to the world around me, some involving "fresh expressions of faith", I'm also being reminded of how essential it is that we keep coming back to the essentials, because, without them, what are we standing for?

Or, to put it another way, without getting our foundations right, what are we standing on?

Like a horse and a carriage

When I was at University, I was told that any movie or book that "reinforces family values" is fundamentally conservative - and, of course, in an Arts degree at the University of Melbourne, "conservative" was well and truly a pejorative term. At the time, it just annoyed me that family values were immediately equated with Conservatism, meaning that anyone who adhered to them might as well just join the Liberal party and start supporting the war in Iraq. Those kinds of terms - conservative vs. progressive - like Left and Right, are unnecessarily reductive, and I was becoming aware of that at the time.

Since finishing my Arts degree, though, I've been struck more than before with how progressive "family values" can sometimes be in this day and age. Now, this may sound a little unusual, but just bear with me and I'll explain where I'm coming from.

Last week a colleague of mine lent me her copy of the BBC's recent modernisation of "The Taming of the Shrew", starring the above-pictured Shirley Henderson and Rufus Sewell. I wasn't exactly sure what to make of it at first when I watched it this afternoon. The gender roles seemed to leave a little to be desired, and Shirley Henderson, funny as she was, did seem just that little, teensy bit over the top, as she sometimes does.

What amazed me, and won me over, though, was the ending, in which Katherine and her new husband are talking to Bianca (Katherine's sister) about the "perfectly sensible" prenuptial agreement that she has asked her 19-year-old Italian toy-boy fiance to sign, on their wedding day. Toy-boy is none too pleased by the prenup, and Bianca can't understand why. We live, she and her mother argue, in an "age of divorce". A pre-nup doesn't mean you're assuming things will go wrong; you're just prepared for the possibility. Knowing how "shrewish" Katherine has been in the past, Bianca calls on her support, and is quite horrified by how Katherine responds. Instead of supporting Bianca, Katherine tells her that her husband should be her lord, and that she should either submit to him completely, placing her hands under his feet, or not marry him at all. Bianca, appalled, asks Katherine if she is willing to "place her hands under her husband's feet". Katherine's reply is the emotional climax of the movie - she would, she says, if he asked her to, but he feels as much respect for her as she feels for him, so he would never require her to do that.

This adaptation never shows what happens to Bianca, nor should it. Perhaps it wants the viewer to make a decision along with Bianca, and it's a decision that, I must admit, I feel like most people should put a bit more thought into they usually do. Why bother vowing to spend your lives together, if you're also preparing for the possibility that that life-long commitment may only last a few years, or, if you're Britney Spears, hours? It's life-long commitment - and total commitment at that - or none at all.

Some of my University lecturers would call this adaptation "conservative", but it's nothing of the sort. In a day and age when divorce and selfishness are the status quo, anything which argues radically against that has got to be progressive, or the terms mean nothing any more. And it's not as if standard gender roles are being reinforced by this adaptation either. The couple remain assertive, unique people. (As well as this, Rufus Sewell's Petruchio has a particular quirk that I'll keep a secret to avoid spoiling it, but it's hard to call the film conservative once you find out what it is.) Perhaps Katherine's arguments about lordship are a little extreme for some tastes - but sometimes extremity is needed to make people think. Marriage is an absolute commitment. That means submission - from both sides. And, much to my (pleasant) surprise, this adaptation of "The Taming of the Shrew" showed mutual submission in quite an admirably progressive light. It really wasn't just the "shrew" who was tamed, because marriage only works when both are willing to sacrifice - to be "tamed", if you will. You leave Katherine and Petruchio at the end confident that their marriage will be one of give and take. And you only want Bianca to marry if you can say the same for hers.

John, I'm only dancing

Not wanting to add to material already covered more than satisfactorily in Dave's post on "guys who don't dance", I have to say I've been forced to think a bit lately about the politics of dancing in public. I've also been forced to recognise that the majority of the people that I work with are very immature. When you remember that I'm a high school teacher, and that I work in a school of 1,400 teenagers, it shouldn't sound surprising, but it is from time to time. Just bear with me and I'll tell you why.

At the request of some of my Year 11 students, on Saturday night I went along to my school's Debutante Ball, a thoroughly anachronistic institution that, amazingly, many teenagers, both male and female, are still quite attached to. I guess it's an opportunity to dress up and get trashed at the expense of parents and school - or maybe there's more to it that I just don't get. Anyway, it seemed important to some of my students that I go to support them, so I was the dutiful teacher, paid my $55 and went along to the Melrose Ballroom in Tullamarine for what my mother would call "an interesting cultural experience".

Now, there was a lot of sitting down, talking, and watching countless teenage girls walk across the dancefloor with their partners and curtsey before the official party. There was also a reasonable amount of dancing. At a few points I contented myself to sit and talk, rather than dance, but when some of the women from work asked me to come out onto the dancefloor, I didn't want to be an uptight pain and say that "no, I didn't dance", which would be a lie - I do, but I did feel uncomfortable at the thought of dancing in front of students, because, when you work with teenagers, you never know what will win you more respect and what will just provide them with scope to laugh at you. Anyway, I decided not to be self-conscious and got out onto that classy Western suburbs dancefloor - and found myself being the token young man dancing with a bunch of (lovely) middle-aged women. Nothing wrong with any of them - they were all very nice. But it was amazing to realise just how much my status as a teacher influenced where I danced, how my dancing was received, etc. Despite being far closer in age to the students than I was to any of these colleagues and spouses of colleagues, I was clearly designated as one of the slightly daggy old people. A bit unsettling, but not an issue for me unless it was an issue for others.

But then you see the looks that some of the students give when they see Sir dancing, and, of course, you know that, to them, seeing you dance is like (to borrow an expression from "Mean Girls"), "seeing an animal walking on its hind legs". You are no longer just a young person dancing. You're a teacher dancing.

A Year 9 boy who I've taught in the past and coached for Debating charmingly told me at school today that "apparently there's a video circulating of you dancing". I refused to react, and showed no interest whatsoever in the situation, which I think was the appropriate response to have, but I went away feeling like somehow I'm no longer just a person. Not in the eyes of my students. Even the kids that like and respect me are a little amused to think that I might dance, or be in any way human. I mean, to give them further ammo today, I arrived at school having had a hair cut (gasp!). I got my fair share of compliments on the hair (it badly needed to be cut, so it was probably an improvement), but was also acutely aware at how much I'm being watched and surveyed. I guess it's just part of life as a teacher, but it's been quite an adjustment this year to realise how much I am on display all the time - and by people who, lovely as they often are, still sometimes delight in identifying faults in you, such as being a slightly dorky dancer. And then there's the ones who are vindictive and cruel. Every school has them. We have to put up with them watching us and laughing at us too, because for them it's about power. We have it, and they resent that.

It just reminds me of how counter-cultural a career teaching is. Normally in life, we go through the various stages of immaturity that everyone goes through in growing up, then, reaching maturity, we spend the rest of our lives (mostly, aside from kids) only with mature people. But in teaching, we willfully return to the often frustrating awkwardness of youth and live alongside it, tolerate it, bear with it every day. It's well worth doing, but also irritating at times. I wonder if it ever gets any less frustrating? As one group of students grows up, we always have a new bunch of Year 7s coming along to replace them. There's no cure for it - just continual patience, and a willingness never to take yourself too seriously.

I'm sure I'll learn. And I'll probably come to embrace how my dancing seems to them. I'd always rather that than be a teacher who doesn't dance.

"Small steps, I just take it day to day"

Just finished racing through the lovely "Small Steps" by Louis Sachar, sequel to the cult teen-lit sensation, "Holes". At first, I was a bit cynical. The head of English at my school had asked me to read it because we're considering putting it on the Year 8 syllabus in place of "Holes" next year. I'd loved the first book, but this year I'd had to teach it to a group that responded to it in a fairly sullen manner, which meant that I was not feeling so enthusiastic towards all things Sachar. I also kind of wondered why we would think of replacing the first book with the sequel, instead of looking for something else altogether.

Now, I haven't had a chance to form a professional opinion on the book just yet, but first of all, I have to say that I loved it, different as it was to "Holes". In fact, I think the differences made it so much more enjoyable than just a re-run of previous successes. All credit to Sachar for being willing to diversify. While he might be happy to make some money out of the immense success of "Holes", this is not a companion piece like his "Stanley Yelnats' Guide to Surviving Camp Green Lake" was. "Small Steps" uses the first novel as a point of departure, focusing on two of the minor characters from "Holes", and taking a very different tone and style.

I was amazed by how satisfying the book was, without being populist. What do I mean by that? In many ways, it had a lot of the hallmarks of a real crowd-pleasing Hollywood film, just in the form of a well-written, intelligent book. There was action, fighting, comedy, and a rollicking good dose of romance. But, well, not wanting to give anything away, the ending was a bit like "Roman Holiday", that classic romance movie that doesn't give the audience everything they thought they wanted, but gives them so much more instead. (Don't try to figure out what happens from the "Roman Holiday" comparison. There's nothing in there about Gregory Peck, and no, the closing lines aren't "Rome. By all means, Rome." Just read the book if you want to know the ending.)

I know that I love the vicarious romance that some films and books offer. When you identify with the everyday characters like Hugh Grant in "Notting Hill", or Theodore in "Small Steps", the thought of that character managing to get it together with the insanely hot girl is, well, satisfying. I first discovered that feeling when my parents showed me the 1980s BBC version of "Pride and Prejudice" (not the one with Colin Firth; the one before that), and I knew, from the start, that, whatever happened, Lizzy and Mr Darcy would get together, and it would be beautiful. So, well, it's a bit disappointing when that vicarious satisfaction is not there for the taking. (Again, trying not to give anything away, but it's hard...) But what I loved about the ending to "Small Steps" was the realism of it. Not in a miserable, existential, nothing-good-ever-happens kind of way. Far from it. There's the potential for much good to happen, but it will happen beyond the closing pages of the book. Now I'm hoping Sachar's got enough artistic integrity not to try and get another book out of it. If there's a third book in the Camp Green Lake cycle, I'm hoping it'll be about Magnet or Squid, or maybe even Zero. No, this isn't a shameless franchising up-in-the-air ending. As the song lyrics that end the novel demonstrate, it's not about sensational, exciting endings. It's about a life lived one step at a time. The kids are only seventeen, after all. Any book that tried to give a deep sense of resolution would be lying. Life isn't like that. Not when you're seventeen, or twenty-three, or eighty-three. No, life is lived in "small steps", taking it day by day. I suck at taking small steps. I want everything tied-up and clear-cut. Thankyou, Louis Sachar, for reminding me of how things really are, and how they need to be.

Togetherness

It's an occupational hazard of the "caring" professions (teaching, nursing, etc.) that you get so caught up in caring for your "clients" that you a) forget to care for yourself, and b) forget to care for your colleagues. Teaching is an amazingly collegial (is that a word?) profession, and I am in a very collegial school. We share resources; we share student-specific tips; we share germs and illness, thanks to school central heating systems; we also share stress at Report Writing times. All jokes aside, I've been amazed by how well the staff at my school get along, aside from the standard, only-to-be-expected workplace politics. We like each other. We like working together.

That being said, when you work in a high-pressure environment (and teaching, whatever they might say in the media, is high-pressure), it's easy to get bogged down in what you have to do, and not to take the time to enjoy the relationships you have at work. It's also hard, when you have so many students demanding time and attention to remember that your colleagues deserve time and attention too - and not always school-related attention.

This really struck me today for a number of reasons. The first reason was when I found out that one of my friends from work - a fellow graduate who sits with me in the staff room - had some sort of seizure/collapse at work late yesterday afternoon, after I'd left. Fairly distressing, really, and a lot of us were quite worried about her. Needless to say, she wasn't in today. Then, later in the day, I found myself in a number of quite meaningful and personally important conversations with colleagues who sit in my section of the staffroom.

Now, I was hardly lazy today. I taught five classes and got quite a bit of marking and preparation done. But I also took the time out to respond to the situations that arose with colleagues. I took the time to call my friend to see how she was. I took the time to have those important and valuable conversations with colleagues in the staffroom. And no, none of that counts as time spent on developing my teaching practice, or on actual teaching. Does that mean it was unimportant? No teacher worth their salt would say that time spent building relationships with students is less important than time spent "teaching" them. If that's the case, then time spent building relationships with colleagues is also essential.

I know that my day was enriched greatly by these experiences. And it was good to be reminded that our lives are more than what goes on in the classroom, and to see that our relationships as colleagues can go beyond sharing lesson plans, and can, at times, enter into the realm of helping each other personally, in ways that we may never full

Unpretentious Gem

(Image from theage.com.au)

As part of the VATE (Victorian Association for Teaching of English) State Conference which I've just been on for the past 48 hours, I was fortunate enough to hear two Australian writers speak. The first I will not name, not because there's anything wrong with him, but because I'd rather not sound like I'm criticising him personally. However, I will say this about him: he is a successful film and television actor who has recently branched out into writing, starting with his memoirs, and then putting out a novel last year. He was an incredibly charismatic and engaging speaker, and, judging by what he read of his novels, he has quite a skill with telling a story. He had us all entertained with the extracts he read.

That being said, there was something about listening to him speak that made me quite uncomfortable, and for a while I couldn't put my finger on it. For the first half of the night, he spoke about a film he had acted in, a certain award-winning Australian film written and directed by his wife, now on the Year 12 VCE English syllabus and taught in almost every Victorian school. As he described the movie as "a great film", "a wonderful piece of cinema", etc., I resisted every (very Australian) temptation to think of him as self-aggrandising, a "tall poppy". Why shouldn't he be upfront about the movie being great? I asked myself. After all, it was other people's work he was acclaiming more perhaps than it was his own. He spoke very highly of his wife, and of his fellow actors, and did not say anything particularly arrogant about his own performance.

Then came the moment when he moved onto talking about his books, which he did so with a bit of a mumble, and some posturings of humility. "Well, I my might just go on about me books for a while," he said, a couple of times. Explaining why he had decided to start writing, he made the following comment: As an actor, he said, you have a "used-by date". So the trick is to recognise that, and "bridge the gap between when you start to go off and when you become a nice bit of yoghurt". The metaphor was a funny one. We all laughed. Mumbling some more, he tried to cover up the point at which he started reading from his book. He then entertained us all with a reading. It was clever; it was touching. We laughed; we didn't exactly cry, but you get the idea.

Yesterday, I had the great privilege of listening to and meeting the lovely, 26-year-old Australian writer Alice Pung, author of one of the most well-received first novels of the last couple of years, "Unpolished Gem", an account of growing up in Melbourne's Western suburbs in a Cambodian immigrant family. Alice had a beautiful Western suburbs accent, spoke simply, with the occasional grammatical slip, but with clear intelligence. Her description of the novel was humble, straighforward and entertaining. It was quite an intimate, personal experience to sit only metres away from her while she described a book that revealed so much of her life and personality. When the woman chairing the discussion asked her to read from her book, she seemed a little embarrassed, had no passage chosen beforehand, but read clearly and with simple but striking flair. The readings were unembellished and touching, and all the more expressive for being unprepared.

Later in the session, I took the opportunity to ask her a question. Having heard her speak a lot about the pressure to succeed in a migrant family and the impact this had had upon her, I wondered if her first novel had now brought up a new kind of pressure to succeed for her. Was she being pressured to write another book? How did that make her feel? When she answered this question, I was able finally to put my finger on what had made me feel uncomfortable by the previous night's author. Alice described how her Buddhist faith - not about religion as much as a way of life - makes her think about what is best for others rather than herself. She had written this first book, she said, because she had something she wanted to offer society, particularly migrant communities. She would only write another book if she thought she had another one worth offering to society.

The difference was clear. The first author wrote because he wanted to remain in the public eye, and his talk, despite all his attempts to appear down-to-earth and humble, was influenced so clearly by that. Alice, on the other had, wrote because of what she thought her writing could offer others. Clearly an introvert, she had no need to be in the public eye. She just had something worth expressing.

I bought a copy of the book, and very much look forward to reading it. I think I'll read the other author's memoirs sometime as well, but I know which author I preferred meeting.

Wanted: One church community

Sometimes I feel as if my life is being governed by two completely opposing forces. In the past, those forces have manifested themselves in the equal but irreconcilable desires to settle down and to move. This year, as I begin, a little confusedly, to make my home in the Northern suburbs, I'm finding that less of an issue. Now, it's more the tension between wanting to mix with people unlike me, and to fit in.

For some time I've found that there's a certain amount of contact with a wide variety of people that I need to feel balanced and well-rounded. I love the feeling of learning from people whose experiences in life have been nothing like mine. I love just how varied society can be, and I love getting to know lots of different people.

But there are a couple of issues that I tend to come up against reasonably often. Here they are:

1) Much as I love mixing with a wide variety of people, most people like to mix only within their own group, so I'm restricted to those who also like to meet lots of different people.
2) I'm quite shy, although you wouldn't always know it, and so, while I often like getting to know lots of different people, this isn't always as easy as I would hope.
3) I hate feeling like I don't belong.

Here I am, right now, having chosen to move to an area where I knew there wouldn't be so many like-minded people, and in some ways I'm loving the diversity and having my horizons broadened. On the other hand, I'm struggling with the lack of like-minded people. I don't want to be surrounded by them. I get sick of people like me, and I get sick of my own company. But I still need some contact with people who see the world like I do - and it's rare enough for me ever to meet anyone with the same outlook on life as me, so I'm wondering sometimes why I've willfully placed myself in an area where I'm reducing the chances of finding like-minded companions.

But here's the paradox: for me to meet people who are truly like me, they can't be complacently sitting in their huddle of like-minded companions. They too need to be out there having their horizons broadened, and associating with wide ranges of people. They probably also need to have a heart for the less glamorous, less privileged, areas of society. Meaning? On one hand, I'm reducing my chances of meeting them by making the move to this area, but, on the other hand, I'm increasing my chances.

Kind of confusing, isn't it?

I suppose at the moment this lack of companionship is at its most pointed in my search for a church community. Christians are in the minority wherever we go. And then there are fewer evangelical churches in the area I've moved into, meaning that I've chosen to move to an area with a reduced representation of a minority group. But...I could go to a church in another area, filled with people like me, but a) would not be being faithful to the direction I feel God has given me in my life, and b) would not be going to church with people who have a heart for the North-West.

I guess I've just got to keep praying, and keep trusting. It's not as if I'm completely alone at the moment, but it can be difficult to know how much we are supposed to belong, when we've already chosen to move out of our comfort zone. I know that God can be trusted. I suppose I'll just have to wait and see what happens next.

Revival in Darebin?

I think I've always had a fairly trendy, underground sense of how an "Emerging Church" would look. Down-to-earth, organic ministry has always had something of a Northcote, Bohemian feel to it in my mind, and it's interesting to think about whether or not that's always the most appropriate form of ministry. Sometimes I suspect we break so far away from the "mainstream", Christendom model of church that we assume "our" style of church is somehow more natural, more relevant and, well, more Christian.

I've finally gotten around to reading my brother's copy of Tom Sine's "Mustard Seed vs. McWorld", which I've had on my shelf for a good three and a half years. I've only just started it, but something has really stood out for me in what I've read so far. Very early on in the book, Sine has this to say about the "postmodern" or 21st century church: "Unlike many of the successful boomer churches of the nineties, post-modern churches are not interested in highly programmatic, user-friendly models that can be replicated. These young leaders are creating models that are much more relational and that are unique to each situation" (my emphasis).

Here's why this stands out to me: I'm not sure that this is any way a fault of the emerging church as much as a fault of my understanding of it, but I know that sometimes my idea of how to do "postmodern church" is itself a little "programmatic": put together some musical artistes playing something that sounds like a Sufjan Stevens and Marc Byrd collaboration, drink Fair Trade coffee during worship, followed by a visually engaging (and interactive) sermon on renewing the city for the kingdom. Now, this all sounds quite cool to me, but the question is, will this approach to ministry be "organic" (natural and symbiotic) in all communities? Well, if I were to find a church two suburbs to the south-east of where I currently live, yes, I have a feeling we'd fit right in. But in Thornbury or Preston? No, to do organic ministry there, you do need to reach out to families, to a variety of ethnicities; and has anyone thought of reaching out to the massive Koori community (the largest in Melbourne, apparently)? Is it possible for one church to minister to all these groups?

Last week I started checking out a very small, evangelical congregation in Thornbury - mostly elderly people, the second largest group being young families. Not my demographic at all, but does that mean I shouldn't try to serve there? The teaching is very engaging and interactive (although not technological - not necessarily a bad thing, disappointed as Rob Bell would be), and they do community very well. Small churches put almost everyone else to shame on this front. I've been welcomed with open arms, even though there's no-one else quite like me there. And so I suppose I'm realising that, while my idea of urban mission would not go down brilliantly in this church, that doesn't mean we can't find unique ways there, as we can anywhere else, of engaging the locals in an active, organic sense of what it is to live out the Gospel in the City of Darebin. I'm a far way from knowing what a potential revival in Darebin could look like, and I want to avoid even suggesting that revival is needed. Sure, the church looks nothing here like it does in the Bible Belt, or the inner-eastern suburbs, but is that a problem? I'd like to see it grow, but I think that first we need to start by encouraging what's already here - renovating, perhaps, instead of revolutionising.

More questions at the moment, but it's a good place to start, I think, asking questions, instead of pretending you have the answers.

With a little help from my friends

One thing that I've found especially rejuvenating about the last couple of weeks of holidays has been contact with people close to me but who circumstances prevent me from seeing all that often. The move to a new area, new church (still in progress), has left me often spending most of my time with people I didn't know this time last year. The result? Well, I suppose on the positive side I'm making a lot of new friends, which is terrific, but the negative side has been the lack of terribly many people who know me well.

It's amazing how much difference it can make just to spend time - it doesn't need to be a huge amount - with people who know us well. The change it can make to our perspective is incredible. For instance, earlier this week I had coffee with my former housemate. We parted ways (not acrimoniously!) at the start of the year when I moved to the North and he moved back to Hawthorn. We were talking about how our old church was progressing (he's still going there), and then we got onto the topic of where I was now going to church. I shared with him my concerns - my issues with a church that I was attending for a while in there, but which turned out to be too far away for me to feel really connected to the community or to what it was doing ministry-wise. And what had seemed a very difficult decision to make - to move on from that church and find somewhere closer - was made to seem so simple by this comment that he made: "Well, staying there would have defeated your purpose in seeking a new church anyway." And instantly, it all came back to me - the many conversations I'd had with him, and others close to me, about how I was going to move onto a new church because I believed I needed to find one that would be ministering to the area I was moving to. Yes, I'd remembered that all the way through the decision-making, but it's incredible how clear it all sounds when someone can say it back to you, when you don't need to fill in all the gaps, explain all the pros and cons, when they can just say, "Well, yes, that was what you were thinking in the first place."

There have been many more positive times with friends and family this past fortnight. That was just one that stands out to me. Today I've spent almost the entire day hanging out with good friends, and I feel really refreshed and like a lot of things have been cleared up in my mind. It makes me realise how lucky I am that, while I don't have huge amounts of time to see my friends at the moment - I'm busy, they're busy, most of my friends don't really live nearby - the difference they make when I do see them is huge, a massive Godsend. Maybe I should be praying that I can have more times like this throughout the school term, to rejuvenate me while I'm working, rather than holding out for the holidays to renew in this way. I think I will pray for that. But it also makes me realise that I should be praising God for all the times like this that I do have, because, rare as they might seem, I'm so lucky to have them at all.

Birth of a blog

Does the world really need another blog? Almost certainly not. In fact, I suspect it could do with fewer. But here's a new one, for what it's worth. Let's hope and pray it can be useful to someone.

Here's where my life is at right now. It might help explain why I've chosen to set up this blog.

This year, I have, perhaps a little thoughtlessly, done exactly what I was always told not to do. It's my first year of teaching, and here's the advice we were all given last year - avoid too much change in the one year (a piece of advice given by a graduate who had, in his first year, moved out of home and become married). No, I'm not married, but I did decide to move to be closer to work - only fifteen minutes away from where I was living, but it feels like another world. And no, I'm not one of those sheltered tribal types who feel like life has ended when they move into the house next door. I've moved around quite a bit, and am, I like to think, fairly flexible. But here's why it was a big step.

Before this year, I had been living in the inner suburbs of Melbourne for five years. I had developed something of a community there - as much as you can in the city - helped no end by my involvement in a small Anglican community church in West Hawthorn, where I had managed to make a lot of like-minded friends. But here was the difficult thing. For a while, our pastor had been teaching about "impacting the city" for God, and I found the teaching very challenging and, well, moving. No pun intended, but, on the other hand, pun intended. Reaching a point when I felt distinctly that it was no longer Hawthorn or the inner city that God was wanting me to impact, but the Northern and Western suburbs, I moved. My sense of God's direction for me was confirmed when I got a job at the school that had first given me that sense of calling, a very large government school in the North-Western suburbs (hence the convergence of North and West). I then moved into a share-house in the North, about fifteen minutes from my school, and the more that this became my life, the less relevant that Hawthorn seemed to me. After a huge amount of prayer, I came to the difficult but clear conclusion that I was to move on from my current church.

So here I am. I've moved houses, started a new job, and have been, for the last several months, without a clearly defined church community.

I'm hoping that, if I'm still writing on this blog in a few years, I will find that this strange, transitional phase of my life has developed into a clear sense of God's direction for my life - or maybe it won't, because God, though He gives us all the direction we need, is rarely very talkative about where exactly He is taking us, or why. But here I am, and we'll see where I go next.